In the Great Green Room

Amy Gary

# UM2642 Hardcover, 288 pages; 2017

No Longer Available

You know Margaret Wise Brown as the author of such beloved children's books as Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, but you may not realize just how much she shaped children's literature as we know it today. Born in Brooklyn in 1910, Brown grew up exploring the fields and forests of bucolic Long Island, spinning stories for her siblings and studying the animals and insects that roamed near her home. Boarding school and college fueled her passion for writing, but success eluded her…until the founder of Manhattan's Bureau of Educational Experiments hired her to write a new sort of children's textbook. So began an extraordinarily prolific career, during which Brown helped to revolutionize and democratize children's literature in America. The matter-of-fact tone of biographer Amy Gary's prose sometimes glosses over the more dramatic twists in Brown's tumultuous personal life, but there is no denying the extraordinary impact the golden-haired girl from Long Island had - and continues to have - on generations of young readers. (KG)